This week we once again take a look at the current state of 3D print companies in the stock market.
The answer to “which company is the biggest” is a bit tricky, as you can measure them in different ways. For our purposes, we’ve been using the market capitalization as per the stock market prices each week. Note that there are several major 3D print companies that are NOT publicly traded (like EOS) that don’t appear on our lists, and several who haven’t yet appeared on the markets, like Markforged and VELO3D, which are expected to appear later this year.
As a reminder, the market capitalization is the value obtained when you multiply the current stock price by the number of shares of each company. It’s effectively what you would have to pay in order to buy the entire operation, and a reasonably good measure of “size”.
Larger Players
Let’s take a look at this week’s ending leaderboard:
| RANK | COMPANY | MARKET CAP (US$M) | CHANGE |
| 1 | Desktop Metal | 3,422 | -1,707 |
| 2 | Protolabs | 3,160 | -272 |
| 3 | 3D Systems | 2,967 | -395 |
| 4 | Nano Dimension | 1,946 | -542 |
| 5 | Materialise | 1,845 | -362 |
| 6 | Stratasys | 1,511 | -245 |
| 7 | ExOne | 641 | -87 |
| TOTAL | 15,627 |
As you can see there have been some notable changes, although the top seven spots are in the same order.
Desktop Metal’s value has dipped notably from last week, and all other major companies dropped in value, albeit not as significantly as Desktop Metal.
Why has Desktop Metal dropped? It turns out the stock, while “new” as the company went public via a SPAC in December, had a heyday in February when they announced the acquisition of rival 3D printer manufacturer EnvisionTEC. That news brought new investors to the stock, causing a rise to an amazing peak of US$33.50 on February 8th. At that price, Desktop Metal was worth over US$8B, substantially larger than others on the leaderboard.
However, since then the Desktop Metal stock price has slowly dropped, likely due to lowered interest after the acquisition: smart buyers picked up the stock then, and are sitting on it now, while some others saw the rise and are now taking profits by selling.
This is not unexpected and really doesn’t affect the intrinsic value of the company in the long term.
Smaller Players
Meanwhile, the lowered capitalizations of the others on the leaderboard were likely due to general market factors: the entire market is somewhat down over the period:
| RANK | COMPANY | MARKET CAP (US$M) | CHANGE |
| 8 | voxeljet | 94 | +7 |
| 9 | ARC Group WW | 24 | +2 |
| 10 | Aurora Labs | 13 | -2 |
| 11 | Tinkerine | 3 | -1 |
| 12 | Robo | 2 | 0 |
| TBD | Massivit | TBD | TBD |
On the smaller side, companies in positions 8-12 generally were flat over the week, except for voxeljet, which rose around eight percent. The only reason I can see for this rise is that their quarterly results were reasonably positive.
Their revenue in several areas declined somewhat, but their gross profit margin increased, suggesting good things could be seen for the future. They’ve been making sales of their larger models, and that’s good news. The company says the lower sales were due to COVID-19, and if that’s the case, then future revenues will increase. In other words, some thought it’s a good time to buy the stock, and the price drifted upwards slightly.
We’ll be back next week with another analysis of Who’s The Biggest in 3D Printing.
